HOT NEWS

UFOs: Not the usual stuff of news stories in the Soviet Union, which are supposed to hew to the line of socialist realism. But the trade union daily Trud startled its readers with two reports about unexplained bright lights, one of which "escorted" an airliner to its destination. The military daily Krasnaya Zveszda (Red Star) set the record straight Saturday: Inversion and refracted light and radio waves. The newspaper recalled the "Petrozavodsk miracle" of 1977, a strange brilliance over the city in Soviet Karelia that the official news agency Tass described as "a torrential rain of light." Explanation: A booster rocket falling away from a Soviet satellite, Cosmos 955.